Hi all, I have spent a good portion of my day getting my baby back up and running. I'm still not done. I have been a mac user for a year and a half now, and in this time, I have learned much about my mac. Yet this problem and fixing it has taught me so much about my mac that I figured it was worth sharing my solution with you all. This post will not be as eloquent as I'm generally known for. It's been a long day. But I hope you guys enjoy all the same.
Just a quick recap. I could hear my Skype and Adium sounds, but VO was not speaking. Yet I knew it was running because I have enough vision to see whether screen curtain is on or off. I wanted to boot VO from CD, but that wasn't working. So I was very worried that Voiceover had been affected systemwide. Now for my adventure. I was completely beside myself and not really sure of what to do. I'd been hanging around in irc on my iphone when one of my really knowledgeable mac friends popped into the room. The first thing he suggested was to try repairing file permissions. I replied that I could not boot from CD. He asked me if I could SSH into my mac; I said yes. So he told me to try a "diskutil verifyPermissions /". He told me to restart my mac, which I did. Still no speech. Then he told me to type say followed by a message. I knew about this command but hadn't thought of it. This command will make your system voice say something if it can. Alex did not speak when I tried the command as a normal user, but it worked when I did a "sudo su", giving myself root access, and then executing say. This led us to the reasonable conclusion that my user had somehow lost Voiceover's permission to speak. Since repairing file permissions did not fix this, the only solution we could think of was to create a new account. But how to do so without sighted help. My friend had found me an awesome article about creating accounts via the command line, but I thought, hmmmm. I wonder if there is a way to log in as root via the gui. Another friend told me that "sudo pass" would allow for this. I was asked for my current user pass and then for a root password. I rebooted the computer, attempted to log in, and voila! Voiceover was speaking quite happily. With control of my computer now back, I created my new account using system preferences. I moved over my data, but what's this? No permission to read documents, library, movies, etc. With some fiddling, I was able to fix this. I navigated to each of the offending folders, hit command-i for file info, and navigated to sharing and permissions. There's a lock right next to that triangle if you tab once. I unchecked it and entered my user password. Then I hit selected add, users and groups, my user account, and hit the select button. In the privileges table, I selected my account, which currently only had read-only access. I selected read and write from the pulldown. In short, I need to finish moving my data over, which I will do tomorrow, but my macbook pro is very much back to normal. Allison's suggestion ended up doing the trick, but I wanted to share my experiences with you all from the perspective of someone who had no sighted help. I also wanted to provide some insight as to why this particular problem would even occur, as I'm sure some of you may have been curious. Have a lovely rest of the weekend, Rose On Oct 22, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Allison Manzino wrote: > Hi, > > No I hadn't thought of loading VO from the CD, I like RIcardo's info, and > will save it for future reference. My Mom had to help me create another > account, I didn't do it all by myself. Couldn't have done it without her, > smile. I hope you get this rectified. > > Musically, > Allison > > My birds are winged blessings, they help me soar! > > > On Oct 22, 2010, at 2:02 PM, Nothingvutlime wrote: > >> HHmmm. I hadn't thought of creating another account. I will get Mom or Dad >> to help me with that later. One quick question though. When you had this >> issue, did you try loading vo from cd? Because that didn't work for me >> either. I'm wondering if there's a bigger problem. >> >> Sent from my iPhone >> >> On Oct 22, 2010, at 12:40 PM, Allison Manzino <gwennac...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hi there, >>> >>> THis happened when I forgot to quit Audio Hijack Pro. THe only way I could >>> get VO to relaunch itself was to create another account. Since my Mac >>> wasn't full of things at the time, this didn't matter and wasn't a >>> problem. The apple support team was stumped as to why this occurred. Now, >>> every time I use Audio Hijack, after I finish recording, I end my session, >>> I always wait a few seconds, check the recordings in my docks, which is the >>> folder I have all my AH stuff in, and then hit command Q while I'm in AH. I >>> hope this helps. I have never had another problem with VO and AH again. >>> Have a wonderful day and good luck getting this resolved. Please let me >>> know if there is anything I can do to help. >>> >>> Musically, >>> Allison >>> >>> My birds are winged blessings, they help me soar! >>> >>> >>> On Oct 22, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Nothingvutlime wrote: >>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> I launched Audio Hijack Pro while on Skype with someone yesterday and >>>> hijacked system audio. Vo was having issues with pretty much any program I >>>> went into. It was saying busy every time I tried to VO around. So I force >>>> quit AHP. VO stopped working, so I restarted. I heard my Skype and Adium >>>> sounds, signaling that both programs had been launched successfully. I >>>> invoked screen curtain, and I could see that it was on. But no peep from >>>> VO, not even to say it was muted. I tried VO-f10, which I believe mutes >>>> and unmutes VO, but that didn't work. I'm honestly stuck. I force quit a >>>> few programs, no other ones which I remember by name. This is the only one >>>> I remember and the only one I think could have caused this mess. My >>>> theory is that VO is still going to Sound Flour, and I don't know how to >>>> tell it to stop. I can always ssh or sftp in and nuke my VO prefs. I'm >>>> pretty sure they're in Library. But I'm afraid of this having harmful >>>> affects. Any help would be appreciated. >>>> >>>> Sent from my iPhone >>>> >>>> -- >>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >>>> "MacVisionaries" group. >>>> To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. >>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>>> macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >>>> For more options, visit this group at >>>> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >>>> >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >>> "MacVisionaries" group. >>> To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >>> For more options, visit this group at >>> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >>> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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